Despite the growing body of scholarship on burnout among social justice activists who are working on a variety of issues, from labor rights to queer justice, little attention has been paid to burnout among those whose activism focuses on issues of educational justice. To begin to address this omission and understand what supports might help social justice education activists mitigate burnout and sustain their activism, we analyzed interview data from 14 activists focused on activist burnout and its implications on movements for educational justice.. This analysis identified 3 major symptom categories of activist burnout and we gained insights into the culture of martyrdom in social justice education movements. These symptoms and the culture of martyrdom, by negatively impacting the health and sustainability of activists, threaten the efficiency and effectiveness of educational justice movements.

“Frayed All Over:” The Causes and Consequences of Activist Burnout Among Social Justice Education Activists

IntroductionTeacher burnout is a chronic phenomenon that continues to be a main cause of teacher exodus in the 21st century. Burnout is a precursor to teacher attrition (Lavian, 2012). Teaching is an emotionally draining and physically exhausting profession that causes many teachers to look for other occupations (Riggs, 2013). In addition, teachers who fail to handle burnout effectively are likely to experience poor quality student interaction, counterproductive instruction, increased absenteeism, which eventually leads to teacher attrition (Suh, 2015). Teacher turnover (30%) is higher than for other professionals, such as pharmacist (14%), engineers (16%), nurses (19%), lawyers (19%), architects (23%), and police (28%) (Ingersoll & Perda, 2014; Riggs, 2013).In the United States, for the 2004-2005 school year, teacher attrition for first year teachers was 12.3%. Beginning-year math teacher attrition rates increased to 14.5%; science teacher attrition was the highest with 18.2% (Ingersoll, Merrill, & May, 2012). Moreover, 24.6% of teachers with little or no traditional teaching preparation left the teaching profession. The attrition percentage rate was lowest (9.8%) for teachers who earned their degree through the traditional comprehensive pedagogy (Ingersoll et al., 2012), which could be an indicator of traditional pedagogy preparing educators for their job requirements.Within the first five years of novice teachers starting their professional paths in education, 50% or approximately half a million educators move to another school district or leave the education profession all together (Alliance for Excellent, 2014; Neason, 2014; Phillips, 2015; Riggs, 2013; Times and Democrat, 2014). According to Riggs (2013), 40% of undergraduate students who were once education majors change their majors before graduating. For those teachers who made it through education pedagogy and entered the profession, 9.5% of them left the classroom before the end of the first school year (Riggs, 2013).Teaching is a disempowering profession (Riggs, 2013). The cornerstone ofteachers' frustrations comes from not having a voice in decisions within the environment, which reflects on their classroom instruction. A strong correlation exists between teachers' abilities to make decisions and staying or leaving the profession (Phillips, 2015). In the 2012-2013 school year, 57.4% of teachers who left the profession said they found more autonomy and control in their current jobs. In addition, 52.2% of teachers who took another career path said they found higher professional prestige. The highest findings with 60.8% of teachers leaving the education profession said they found more of a balance between professional and personal life (U.S. Department of Education, 2014), which suggests that other occupations do not have job requirements outside of the work environment.Between 2010 and 2020, the demand for kindergarten through 12th grade teachers was projected to increase by 17% for kindergarten through eighth grade teachers and 7% for high schoolteachers (Staklis & Henke, 2013). The increase of teacher demand will be hard for low-income school districts that struggle to recruit and retain qualified teachers, especially in mathematics and science (Staklis & Henke, 2013). Teacher exodus or relocating to another school district can cost impecunious schools a substantial amount of their budget. Losing teachers can cost individual schools a range of $4,366 (New Mexico) to $17,872 (Chicago) (Frahm, 2014). Teacher attrition can cost school districts up to $2.2 billion a year (Alliance for Excellent, 2014; Phillips, 2015: Rizga, 2015). The estimated cost of teacher attrition nationwide has been as high as $7.3 billion a year (Kain, 2011; National Commission on Teaching and America's Future [NCTAF], 2007).After understanding the magnitude and the monetary burden of teacher attrition, it is important to focus on methods to address this persistent phenomenon. …

Teacher Burnout: A Quantitative Analysis of Emotional Exhaustion, Personal Accomplishment, and Depersonalization

Learning from those who no longer teach: Viewing teacher attrition through a resistance lens

The researchers of this study used a mixed-methods approach to understand issues of rural special education teacher burnout. Results of survey responses (n = 64) and follow-up focus group interview...

Mixed-Methods Analysis of Rural Special Educators’ Role Stressors, Behavior Management, and Burnout:

This meta-analysis verifies associations between three dimensions of special education teachers’ (SET) burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment) and student-, t...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244020918297

A Meta-Analysis of Special Education Teachers’ Burnout:

Introduction Attrition rates of special education (SpEd) teachers in the United States have historically been high. Plash and Piotrowski (2006) wrote that attrition rates among SpEd teachers were 13% annually. The 2013 listing of teacher shortages published by the United States Department of Education evidenced that since 1990, SpEd has been identified as a critical shortage area in the state of Alabama and in most other states as well. High attrition rates of SpEd teachers make it difficult to provide qualified teachers to teach special needs students. Many school systems are forced to hire "out of field" in order to fill SpEd teacher positions. Mitchell and Arnold (2004) wrote that SpEd teachers leave the classroom at approximately twice the rate of their general education (GenEd) colleagues. Hale-Jinks, Knopf, and Kemple (2006) conducted a literature review and found that high levels of job stress have been linked to decreased job satisfaction and job turnover among teachers. Retaining qualified SpEd teachers in the Nation's schools has been an established problem for decades. Particularly problematic is the fact that SpEd teachers are increasingly reporting perceptions of burnout. The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, released in 2014 included the statement that 51% of teachers surveyed reported feeling under a great deal of stress several days a week. Background The Job of the Special Education Teacher As in other helping professions, the SpEd teacher has hourly contact with special needs students. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 6.5 million children and students with disabilities are currently receiving educational and other support services in federally supported programs nationwide. The majority of those individuals are served by public schools. Although GenEd teachers have various duties associated with their jobs, the SpEd teacher has many more additional duties and responsibilities. In addition to teaching in some type of setting, the SpEd teacher is assigned a caseload. Caseload is generally defined as the number of special needs student files the teacher is responsible for. In other words, the number of Individualized Education Programs (IEP's) the teacher is responsible for writing, maintaining, and implementing. Due to Federal and State mandates and additional paperwork required at the local level, the amount of paperwork a SpEd teacher is tasked with is daunting. The SpEd teacher must complete all reevaluations, functional behavioral assessments, behavior intervention plans, and IEPs on a computer program. That workload is doubled, because in spite of the argument that technology has streamlined the process, the SpEd teacher must maintain a hardcopy file of the IEP and all supporting documents. Each piece of paper in the student file must be placed in a specific order. The hardcopy files are subject to administrator, school system, or State Department of Education scrutiny at any time. Additionally, the electronic paperwork is subject to scrutiny by the school SpEd department chair, resource consultant, the Special Services Coordinator, and the State Department of Education. Most SpEd teachers agree that the volume and standards for the paperwork are at best, unreasonable, and at times ludicrous. It is common for paperwork to be redundant or unnecessary. The SpEd teacher is responsible for conducting all meetings pertaining to implementing the IEP and maintaining student files in the manner prescribed by the local school system and State and Federal guidelines. The special educator is charged with teaching the GenEd curriculum to SpEd students in a variety of settings. More often than not, the students have a variety of disabilities. The SpEd teacher has to teach or assist in teaching every subject that a student could possibly take with the expectation that the special needs students will perform on standardized tests at the same proficiency level as their GenEd peers. …

Catherine Dikes

Papers

The Implications of Demographic Variables as Related to Burnout among a Sample of Special Education Teachers.